In the course of a growing season, modern plant culture dictates multiple treatments with fertilizer and pesticide; and in winter, where snow and ice are present for periods of time, proper property and equipment (e.g. aviation) maintenance requires the application of de-icing and anti-icing materials. A practitioner of plant culture must decide whether a particular treatment is best performed with a granular product or a liquid spray application. Crops as diverse as turf, grain crops, tubers, ground fruits and vegetables, and horticultural plantings are routinely treated with either granular or sprayed substances. Facility and equipment maintenance operations likewise employ either granular de-icers or liquid compositions, so a similar choice must be made by that practitioner. Each application method has limitations. Specifically, while granule broadcast tends to provide a simple broadcast, generally long-term release and safe handling, granules are difficult to adhere to plant and equipment surfaces, create concentration gradients about each granule, and represent an ongoing potential toxin or physical entity that can be inadvertently contacted or ingested by humans or fauna, or pose mechanical problems for equipment such as maintenance and aviation equipment. In contrast, spray treatment generally requires considerable skill for application, contacts only exposed foliage and equipment and surfaces receiving indirect drainage from other surfaces, and tends to dissipate, or “run off”, quickly. Some sprays such as anti-icers to surfaces or fruit crops require the use of expensive polymers and additives in order to prolong the “holdover time”, or length of time the equipment may be allowed to stand ice free. Based on these treatment characteristics, pesticides targeting weed leaves or foliage-feeding pests and de-icers and anti-icers targeting equipment surfaces tend to be applied as a liquid spray, while fertilizers and pesticides targeting weed seeds, grubs and other soil-dwelling pests and de-icers and anti-icers targeting paved surfaces often are delivered as granules. Regardless of whether spray or granule broadcast is used, the application method is not completely satisfactory. For instance, spray application fails to reach pests dwelling on the underside of foliage and is quickly dissipated and leached into soil by rain, and liquid de-icers and anti-icers can cause environmental wastewater management problems because a significant excess amount of product must be used in order to allow for adequate contact time.
Granular pesticide formulations often require the use of additional pesticide due to inefficiencies in the timely release, or efficient environmental extraction, of the pesticide from the associated granular substrate materials.
While there exists a need for a granule that, through foaming upon contact with water, has desirable attributes of both granule, broadcast and spray treatment for use in plant culture and/or in de-icing and anti-icing, the moisture reactivity of components needed to induce foaming has left prior art products vulnerable to ambient humidity premature activation. This has been addressed in the prior art of cosmetics through the inclusion of dried medicinal herbs in a sachet or granule, such as in products detailed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,948,439; 6,800,597; and 6,506,713. Unfortunately, the natural oils are degraded by drying to a low water content. Additionally, dried plant stuffs such as leaves, roots, or stalks of medicinal herbs suffer from low moisture absorption, low densities, and enhance pelletized composition porosity. Segregation of components into separate layers of a granule largely overcomes ambient humidity premature activation but at the expense of a more complicated process of manufacture. While a binder has previously been used to adhere particulate into a granule or other form, little attention has been paid to inclusion of a binder material or biomaterial that has been present in an amount and at a dryness level to enhance the storage stability of the resultant composition.
Thus, there exists a need for a gas-evolving homogeneous composition that is insensitive to ambient humidity premature gas evolution. There further exists a need for such a composition that lacks a surface coating to prevent ambient humidity premature gas evolution.